Genome project goes into overdrive

A PRIVATE company announced plans this week to sequence the human genome by 2001, four years sooner than the target date set by the publicly funded Human Genome Project.

All the data will be made freely available to researchers. "We decided it would be morally wrong to keep the data secret," says Craig Venter, president of the still unnamed company and founder of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland.

Formed by TIGR and Perkin-Elmer, a scientific equipment manufacturer in Norwalk, Connecticut, the new company will use powerful DNA sequencing machines to read the 30 billion bases in human DNA within three years. "You may describe this as the full monty," says Venter. He estimates that sequencing the genome will cost around $200 million.

"We will take a large number of machines and build a super genome-sequencing factory," he says. "The raw sequence data will be freely accessible ...

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